How to make your images smaller for use on WordPress?

Every time we launch a new website for a client, the learning curve for WordPress always impresses us with its speed and ease.

However, this is not so when it comes to media management and reducing the (sometimes enormous) size of the images that they want on their websites. People just have an inordinate amount of problems in reducing the size of the images before uploading them. Added to this the different Operating Systems they all have on their PC’s and Mac’s etc, and we have been struggling to have this done.

We have been looking for a Monkey Simple solution to this for quite a few years, and now we have found one that works across the boards!

PunyPNG and SmushIt.

PunyPNG

example PunyPNG is a simple and free website optimisation tool that will do all the work for us. It dramatically reduces the file size of your PNG images without any loss of quality.

They also have a pro version if you have an awful lot of images you want to do at once  but we just use their free service. You don’t even have to log-in to get the images compressed.

All you do is go to PunyPNG.com and click on the big green button that says “Upload Images”.

Find the image you want to compress on your computer and it will do the work for you. PunyPNG will then tell you how much it’s reduced that PNG File. Then you just download it, save it to your PC and then upload it again to your WordPress Media Library the normal drag and drop way.

PunnyPNG comaprision
PunnyPNG comaprision

No one will be able to blame your images for your blog not loading quickly. We never want that to happen right! Whether you have a GIF, JPEG or PNG, you can use punypng for fast page loads and help make the web faster!

Smush.it

Smush.it is useful tool form Yahoo! (yes they still have SOME use to us, lol).

Yahoo’s Performance series recommends optimising images in several lossless ways:

  • stripping meta data from JPEGs
  • optimizing JPEG compression
  • converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
  • strips the un-used colours from images

It uses optimisation techniques specific to the image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality.

The best bit about this tool is that is works behind the seams through a very efficient plugin called WP Smush.it.

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